ON September 22, 1908, in the 40 Holy Martyrs church in Veliko Turnovo, Prince Ferdinand declared Bulgaria a kingdom independent from the Ottoman empire and thus opened a new historical period, today known as the Third Bulgarian Kingdom.

The date is celebrated on the Bulgarian official calendar today as Independence Day.

Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a German aristocrat who was known as the "Austrian candidate", had been prince of Bulgaria since June 1887.

Neither Russia nor Turkey had given their approval of Bulgaria's National Assembly's choice of Ferdinand. France, Germany, Russia and Turkey all declared the election illegal.

Soon afterward, a new government headed by Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov was set up.

Historians today refer to those times as a time of political turbulence, as a time of confrontation between the political elite and the ordinary people. The confrontation had its roots in the divergent views on Russia, with camps that were either strongly pro or anti. For all this, which determined the troubled course of politics in the time of Stambolov and in the year that immediately followed, Bulgaria was set on a path of new political and economic development.

In the Stambolov years, Bulgaria was an agrarian state in which three quarters of people earned their living from agriculture. However, foreign investment was starting to arrive, and domestic manufacture was protected by law.

The territory of which Ferdinance became king in 1908 was that which had been established in 1885 through the union of the Principality of Bulgaria with Eastern Rumelia (south of the Balkan mountain range). This state, which had been nominally still part of the Ottoman empire until Ferdinand's proclamation, had roughly the same territorial boundaries as today's Bulgaria.

The proclamation by Ferdinand on September 22, 1908, included the words: "Always peaceful, my people today cherish (Bulgaria's) cultural and economic progress; nothing should hamper Bulgaria in achieving this progress.

"My people and I are truly content with Turkey's political revival; Turkey and Bulgaria, free and independent of each other will have all the conditions to create and strengthen friendly relations and to turn towards peaceful domestic development".

The declaration of Bulgaria's independence show-ed this country's ambition to play an active role in Balkan relations and represented a major turning point in Bulgaria's history.

It represented a point at which Bulgaria, notwithstanding the views of powerful countries to the West and to the East, took its destiny in its hands.